Category: Politics

1) She is the most qualified candidate, period, just in terms of her résumé.

Even leaving off everything up to the early ’90s, she’s had a front-row seat for two successful Presidential campaigns, and mounted a very strong campaign for the Democratic nomination. She lived in the White House for 8 years, and traveled around the world with the president. Where other First Ladies have mostly chosen politically inoffensive charity work to occupy their time, she made developing a universal health care plan her pet project. (It did not go well, mostly because the country wasn’t even ready to talk about that. We can talk about it as easily as we do now because she brought it to the national stage 20 years ago.) When she ran for senator, a lot of people argued she’d gotten above her station, since they believed the non-office of FLOTUS was mostly a matter of “serving tea to ambassadors.” She was elected anyway, and served as senator of a state with a diverse population of nearly 20 million people, including a city of 8 million. Then, when she ran for president in 2008, the “serving tea” line came around again, regarding her lack of substantive foreign policy experience. So you know what Hillary Clinton did? Hillary Clinton got the man who was her rival mere moments before to make her Secretary of Fucking State.

3) She’s nakedly ambitious. This is a frequent criticism of her, as though it’s a quality some other candidates for President of the United States lack. Personally, I love it. I love seeing what it looks like when a woman refuses to be told what she cannot do, again and again, at higher and higher levels.

4) She has a brilliant mind. Even her opponents acknowledge this.

5) I believe she sincerely cares about women, children, poor people, people of color, people with disabilities, queer people. I believe she cares, in a bone-deep way, about improving lives. I can’t prove this, obviously—I’ve never even met her. But I believe it, and I think that’s one of the biggest differences between me and a lot of people who agree with me politically on a zillion points, but can’t stand her.

If you believe she’s a slick narcissist/sociopath who cares about nothing but gaining power for its own sake, of course you’re not going to vote for her. If you believe her real interests lie only with the 1%, or that she’s by nature a warmonger, of course you should oppose her. I don’t believe those things. And you’d think that would be too obvious to mention, but a lot of folks seem to think I just don’t know much about her, or haven’t given the “evidence” for their animosity toward her enough thought.

I know. I have. And still, I reject the idea that she’s secretly Cruella de Vil. I find her both genuinely likable and as sincere as any politician—which is to say, not entirely by a long shot, but close enough on the things that matter most to me. Perhaps history will show that I was hopelessly naïve. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I know as much about her as a stranger can. This is my conclusion.

6) She is not her husband. To be fair, I voted for him once, and though I was two months shy of my 18th birthday the first time he ran for president, I would have voted for him then. But today, if Bernie were running against a Bill Clinton who hadn’t already served two terms, I would probably vote for Bernie.

Some will say this proves that that if you made Hillary a man, I wouldn’t vote for her. Sound the reverse sexism klaxon and declare a winner! (Hint: It’s not the woman.) I would refer those so inclined back to my opening remarks about developing a deep understanding of sexism before you can discuss this election knowledgeably.

If you made Hillary a man, she would not be Bill Clinton. She would still be an entirely different person from him (albeit one who lacks personal experience of sexism and the embodied experience of being a woman, which are among the many things I do find worth considering). Failing to recognize that a husband and wife are two separate people, and that it’s accordingly possible to admire one more than the other, is a really basic, 101-level sexist foul. (Yes, even when they ran on a “two-for-one” platform more than 20 years ago, when she was not the candidate.)

7) Related: She has never been president before. Again, you’d think this was too obvious to mention, but I swear, people act like they’re confused about it. She was not president in the ’90s. “The Clintons” were not president. William Jefferson Clinton was. Hillary did not sign bills into law. She did not hold executive power. She did not fuck Monica Lewinsky. As you’ve gathered by now, I think she would make an excellent president, so I would love to see her do that, instead of watching people simultaneously claim the FLOTUS years produced no accomplishments she can call her own and that she’s already had her turn at the wheel.

8) She does her homework like Hermione Granger on an Adderall bender. What this means is that even if I don’t always agree with her decisions (which I surely will not), I trust that they’ll be thoroughly considered by a sharp mind. It’s something a lot of people, including me, appreciate about President Obama. I look forward to eight more years of the same baseline level of assurance that my president is not A) dumber than me or B) prone to going off half-cocked. We’re all still smarting from the W years.

9) She’s the best candidate on women’s issues. Disagree with me if you like (quietly, to yourself, or anywhere that’s not in my Twitter mentions), but here are some reasons why I believe this.

For starters, if you look at both Clinton and Sanders’s “women’s issues” pages, you’ll see they both promise to do very similar things as president, but Clinton’s also includes a section on what she’s already done. She’s bulletproof on choice, was first to say that she’ll move to repeal the Hyde amendment, and has been the only candidate to bring up abortion or the recent political and physical attacks on Planned Parenthood during a debate. She’s worked domestically and globally to end sexual violence against women and has made one promise regarding campus sexual assault prevention at home that I find really noteworthy: to “increase… education programs that cover issues like consent and bystander intervention, not only in college, but also in secondary school.” It’s the secondary school thing that matters, because a review of 140 sexual assault prevention programs found only two actually worked, and both were aimed at junior high and high school students, not college students. This tells me she’s up to date on best practices, and ready to make policy accordingly.

Our foreign policy must reflect our deep commitment to help millions of oppressed people around the world. And of particular concern to me is the plight of women and girls, who comprise the majority of the world’s unhealthy, unschooled, unfed, and unpaid. If half the world’s population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity is in serious jeopardy. The United States must be an unequivocal and unwavering voice in support of women’s rights in every country on every continent.

And then, after she was confirmed, the Obama administration created an Office on Global Women’s Issues (reporting to Clinton) and… well, pop over to the Center for American Progress and read about everything that happened for women while she was Secretary of State.

She wants to close the pay gap, invest in child care, and raise the minimum wage. She recognizes the economic damage that bad parental and family leave policies create, and there’s no doubt in my mind she’ll prioritize exposing and resisting the many ways that mothers—and plenty of other people, but let’s be real, mostly mothers—get fucked in the workplace. (I’m not a mother, so I think maybe, possibly, I’m allowed to say that without being accused of talking out my vagina.) I’m going to move on to the next point now, but believe me, I could say a lot more on this one.

10) I cannot imagine anyone who has a better handle on global and domestic affairs than she does. In some ways, this is just reiterating number 1, but it’s not only about a list of accomplishments—it’s about the breadth of knowledge she’s accumulated in that time. Think of all the things she simply won’t need explained to her. That frees up time to get things done—and to learn about new things, and delve into old things with a degree of depth and nuance not available to someone who first needs to be brought up to speed.

11) She has a history of admitting mistakes and, where possible, correcting them. Her vote on the war in Iraq. Gay marriage. Her support of her husband’s disastrous 1994 crime bill. Republicans (and not a few on the left) call this flip-flopping, as though we should prefer someone who reaches the age of 68 without ever changing her mind. Everyone makes mistakes—sometimes grave ones—and that goes double for politicians. What I care about is whether you can recognize that, chip away at your own biases, update your thinking, and do better every day. I think she can and she does.

12) At this writing, the Five Thirty-Eight “Endorsement Primary”—measuring support from congressional representatives, senators, and governors—has Clinton with 466 points, Bernie Sanders with 2, and no Republican candidate with more than 65. The negative take is that that proves she’s “Establishment” as all get-out. The positive take is that the people she’s going to have to work with to make anything happen as president like her a hell of a lot more than anybody else who’s running.

13) I believe she can wipe the floor with any of the Republican candidates in the general election. Obviously, that’s not something anyone can predict with absolute certainty, but I think there’s a great deal of evidence to that effect, from her résumé to her debate skills to her long history of fending off Republican attacks with a fly swatter and a heavy sigh. A lot of Americans truly hate her, beyond all reason. I recognize this. I still think it’s a safe bet she can win easily.

14) Contrary to Rush Limbaugh’s prediction, I love watching her age in public. We so rarely get to see any woman do that.

15) Because her mother was born before American women could vote, and Hillary was born before they could get their own credit, serve on juries, or access reliable birth control. Before they could file a report about sexual harassment in the workplace or rape in the marital bed. When Hillary was born, there had been zero female graduates of Yale Law, only one elected female senator, zero female Secretaries of State, and, ahem, zero female U.S. presidents. And check out the career path she took anyway.

Shapely Prose is dead; long live Shapely Prose! This place felt righter than any to drop a couple of passionate pro-Hillary blog posts, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knew me in 2008. Unlike 2008, I will not be dealing with comments, and I will not write a zillion more blog posts after this, telling myself each time that it’s the definitive one. I’m back for two posts only, and then the closed sign goes back up.

First, please note how I said “my vote,” not yours, in the title. I’ve been asked repeatedly to lay out the reasons why I support her in one place, so that’s what I’m about to do. This is not “Why You, Person I May or May Not Know, Should Vote for Hillary or Eternally Lose My Good Will.” It is simply a long (but by no means exhaustive) list of reasons why I, Kate Harding, would gladly cast a vote for her in the primaries, except I live in a caucus state now and am going to be in England on Super Tuesday. 😫😫😫

I’m trying to resist the temptation to add a lot of disclaimers, because frankly, I’m tired of that being the expectation. In a post titled “Why I’m Supporting Hillary with Joy and without Apologies,” Joan Walsh covers the whole “there are reasonable reasons not to support her” and “of course you don’t have to vote for a woman to be a feminist” thing. So did Katha Pollitt, in a post titled “Why I’m Ready—and Excited—for Hillary.” So did the New York Times in their endorsement of her. If you really don’t know the answer to questions about whether Hillary supporters are actually coming for Bernie supporters’ feminist cards, or whether women who have been voting and watching Hillary Clinton in public life for decades are aware that she voted for the Iraq war in 2002, supported Goldwater when she was 16, has engaged on different levels with a great many nasty rich people, et fucking cetera, the answers you seek are but a Google away.

I’m not going to declare that I’m not apologizing, or I’m not ashamed, because it pisses me off that so many liberals and progressives have decided that should be the default position for anyone who likes one of the most accomplished and admired women in the world. In history. I reject that framework entirely.

Today, ostensibly left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald—author of a much-shared article declaring aggressive, Clinton-hating “Bernie Bros” non-existent, based on the truly puzzling data point that they don’t flood the Twitter mentions of white male Sanders supporters—tweeted a link to a 2008 post by my friend Rebecca Traister.

“Yes, it’s as though sexism on the left were still a thing,” said Traister. And me, and every female activist who’s ever been shouted down by a bunch of guys who are not even the slightest bit sexist but just really need to tell certain objectively ignorant, whiny, overreacting, time-wasting women to get on board or GTFO.

Rebecca and I and a lot of other women complained about it coming from Obama supporters in 2008 because it did. For a lot of us, the Bernie Bros are Obama Bros redux: (mostly) young (mostly) men who are aggressive in their hatred of Clinton and their need to ejaculate that hatred in the direction of any woman who publicly supports her. What amuses me, as someone going through the same shit for the second time, is that even the arguments are practically identical. Clinton’s a monster for all the usual reasons, but her opponent is a true progressive who is going to do a million glorious things the “establishment candidate” never could.

The main difference this time is that her opponent has a legitimate claim to being slightly more progressive. Last time, she was running against her political twin (save for one vote that happened before he was a senator), who just happened to be far savvier about using progressive rhetoric. (I mean, we all understand this now, right?) If I have to get screamed at again that she’s “business as usual” while her opponent is poised to spearhead a revolution, at least this time the candidates are 7% different on the issues.

1) Because it’s the immediate context in which my brain is forming the words before you right now, hence ongoing subtext of “grrrrrrrrrrrr” in a post that’s meant to be positive.

2) Because if you don’t get that sexism exists on the left and everywhere else—I mean, really, really get it—you can’t make a fully informed argument for or against either of the two Democratic candidates running right now.

Saying “gender doesn’t factor into my decision at all” or “gender doesn’t matter to me,” is, in fact, sexist. Gender matters to you because you are a citizen of a society where gender matters a great deal in ways large and small, spoken and unspoken. You are a citizen of a society that openly scorns ambitious women, women with power, women who act decisively, women who dare to get older, women who don’t fucking care if you like it. You are a citizen of a society that has never had a woman president, that until 2008 had never seen a woman win a single primary, and that is not an accident. Gender matters.

No, it’s not the only thing that matters, and I fucking resent that I feel obliged to say that because OBVIOUSLY it’s not the only thing that matters, and the constant demands that we spell that out are, yes, also inherently sexist. The message is, “Since you brought up gender, please immediately clarify that you are not some crazy bitch whose political positions are a centimeter deep.” See, if you assume that feminist commentators are just as likely as any other commentators to be thoughtful, reasonable, and capable, you won’t need that reassurance. Conversely, if you’re automatically suspicious that feminist commentators are overreacting, or perhaps fabricating offenses for some sort of never-specified personal gain, it’s possible you’re not as progressive as you think.

And it’s impossible for me (or anyone) to talk about why I support Hillary outside of this context: that sexism is real, pervasive, insidious. That gender matters, whether we like it or not. 🚨YOU CAN ACKNOWLEDGE THIS FACT AND STILL NOT PREFER OR EVEN LIKE HILLARY CLINTON.🚨 But if you insist that it’s possible to divorce gender from the dynamics of this primary season, or 2008’s, or really any in American history—psst, when it’s all white guys running, race and gender are factors—you are denying reality. End of.

It will surprise few people who pay attention to American politics that Sarah Palin is a world-class hypocrite. But her recent foray into the politics of language and disability have proved that her hypocrisy is dyed in the wool, an amazing contradiction of terms: openly disingenuous, profoundly committed to shallowness. She’s taken one of the easiest to understand (if not to implement) tactics of social justice activism — avoid using slurs — and turned it into an operatic denial of her last ounce of intellectual integrity.

Here’s the background: according to the WSJ, last August, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called a group of liberal activists “fucking retarded” to their faces. He has since apologized to the head of the Special Olympics and disability activists (who, not incidentally, have rarely been even named in the articles about the apology — but that’s another post altogether). Sarah Palin comes into this because she publicly called out Emanuel on Facebook:

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

A patriot in North Andover, Massachusetts, notified me of Rahm’s “retarded” slam. I join this gentleman, who is the father of a beautiful child born with Down Syndrome, in asking why the Special Olympics, National Down Syndrome Society and other groups condemning Rahm’s degrading scolding have been completely ignored by the White House. No comment from his boss, the president?

As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better… Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Mr. President, you can do better, and our country deserves better.

Notice, however, that Palin is not actually mad at Emanuel; she’s mad at President Obama. Why? Because he has said nothing about an incident that occurred without him, half a year ago, for which a public apology has been issued. Don’t get me wrong — it would be amazing if the Obama White House takes this opportunity to make a serious, public effort to commit further to the needs of PWD. But Palin’s immediate redirect from Emanuel to Obama smacks of… well, something other than a desire to “stop the r-word,” as a recent campaign enjoins us.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown brilliantly analyzed Palin’s political performance a few days ago, in a post I cannot recommend enough. Here’s Sady’s conclusion, which comes after examining her own reasons for eliminating certain slurs from her diction [ed. note: I snipped some of this quote after posting because I didn’t realize how long it was till I hit “publish”]:

Because here is the thing: it is the ability to communicate concepts and define the reality of a situation from which the power of words is derived. When they become pure noise – divorced from reality, divorced from concepts, used at odds to the concepts and realities they should be defining – that’s when this all gets hairy. I can’t say “that’s so gay” because it makes me sick, because I know what it means. I started working to eliminate “retarded” from my vocabulary a while back, because I thought about it and now I know what it means. But it’s when someone like Sarah Palin can score points by saying that the word “retarded” is wrong, although her career is based on a politics that is measurably bad for a lot of disabled people (and, you know, everyone else) that I start to get worried.

[…]

There is no purpose, behind her Facebook post and her call-out of Emanuel, beyond continuing a program of obstructing a Democratic agenda and the current President. It’s precisely as duplicitous as the cries of “sexism” in the right during the primaries. Is there sexism in the Democratic Party, and in the treatment of Sarah Palin? Fuck yes, there is. Was Rahm’s use of the term ableist? Is there ableism in the left? Was the response to the ableism handled poorly? Fuck yes, to every single one of those questions. But pointing that out when you know that your own party and/or political agenda isn’t going to prioritize social welfare programs which would help the disabled, when they’re trying to make universal access to healthcare impossible, when you don’t have a compassionate stance on the issues of unemployment and poverty to which disability is inexorably linked, when you are opposing abortion rights and charging victims for their rape kits, is just about the most disgusting corruption of these legitimate issues – these issues about which I care immensely – that I can imagine. Palin’s response isn’t about ableism, or about Rahm Emanuel; if it were, she would be talking about Rahm Emanuel and ableism, rather than sneakily using both subjects to get in a jab at Obama. Palin’s response is about Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

But – again – if she knows how to use the language, she wins. Because she is able to sound, for a moment, like the people who are genuinely engaged in talking about disability, and the structure that punishes and hurts people with disabilities. Which is where language debate gets scary. Because if we put forward, for one second, a language debate that isn’t irrevocably tied to structure – if we focus on language apart from the actual change that needs to happen – everything we care about gets stolen and re-purposed in the service of something else. Words have power. For example, they can be used to tell a pretty enormous lie.

Bra-fucking-va, Sady. Sarah Palin has a personal stake in fighting ableist language. So do I. If Emanuel hadn’t apologized for calling people “fucking retarded,” you can bet I would be writing an angry post about it. But Sady is right: oppressive language is irrevocably tied to oppressive social structures. That’s why the language is oppressive in the first place. It’s awful to say something is “retarded” because the punch of the word is based on the equation of “disability” and “bad.” If people with disabilities weren’t systematically devalued in our culture, told that they’re less than human, that their bodies are grotesque and their minds pathetic, that they are a burden to able-bodied people and that having access to basic rights is an outrageous affront to hard-working small-business owners — to pick just a few of the abelist messages that are commonplace — then no one would say “retarded” anyway. Because it wouldn’t have any impact as an insult. Which is why Sarah Palin’s call for President Obama to fire Emanuel rather than, say, hold a summit with disability advocates, is clearly about political one-up-man-ship: it lets Palin look like she cares about PWD, in a broad sense (just like voting for Palin allowed certain right-winger to look like they cared about women in politics), without doing a goddamn thing with her political power and her cultural capital to make our culture less oppressive of them.

So clearly, Palin was already showing her ass and joining the race for Miss Hypocrite USA 2010. But it took a little help from professional evil man Rush Limbaugh to expose how miraculously mercenary she is. Rush Limbaugh, as I’m sure you all know, makes a living by being hateful. So when he got the chance, he upped the “retard” ante:

Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards. I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks. They are looney tunes. And I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m just quoting Emanuel. It’s in the news. I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.

So. No surprises here, just the usual hate. Limbaugh defends Emanuel because he’s bashing liberals via ableist language, and he goes the extra mile, calling an upcoming meeting with PWD a “retard summit.” If Rahm Emanuel should be personally fired by the President, Limbaugh should at least retract what he said, right? Or apologize to Palin herself, since she’s been a guest on his show? Surely if something is hurtful when it was reported in the WSJ six months after Rahm Emanuel said it, something more vicious is hurtful when Rush Limbaugh broadcasts it instantly to millions of listeners, right?

“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups “retards.” “Rush Limbaugh was using satire … . I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards,’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there.”

I’ll give you a moment.

Sarah Palin, who posted this on her Facebook page: Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities – and the people who love them – is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking, thinks it’s fine when Rush Limbaugh did it because he was talking about “kooks” and did not say “fuck.” Sarah Palin, who claims to want her son Trig to grow up free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better, thinks it’s somehow not unacceptable or heartbreaking to call someone a “retard” if you don’t actually do it to their face.

Sarah Palin is the worst kind of “ally,” the kind who uses her own status as Super Special Ally to Oppressed Peoples to make herself look good and her enemies look bad without even pretending to care about the actual effect on the people who are actually oppressed. Sarah Palin, like the proverbial white person who has some friends who are black, is the able-bodied person who has some son with a cognitive disability. She’s not advocating for PWD; she’s not advocating for anyone but her own damn self and her right to be on TV every goddamn second.

Sarah Palin, basically, has become Michael Scott, except even more self-congratulatory and less kind.

Hey all, remember back in July when Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan mean-girled soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor for not dressing femme enough? It turns out those “1980s lady power broker” suits were chosen for her by “government officials.”

Think Progress has a couple of posts up today about Republican politicians, when directly asked if they think President Obama is a socialist, admitting that he’s, you know, not. House Minority Leader John Boehner’s interview is especially telling:

GREGORY: Do you really think the President is a socialist?

BOEHNER: Listen, when you begin to look at how much they want to grow government, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is —

GREGORY: What do you call it though?

BOEHNER: This is unsustainable. We’re broke.

GREGORY: That’s fine. Do you think the President is a socialist?

BOEHNER: No!

The tone with which Boehner says “no” is, to my ear, exasperation: of course we all know that the President of the United States is not actually a socialist. But it serves the Republican party to spread the lie that he is, because they count on two things: 1) People not knowing what “socialist” means, and 2) Never being asked point blank if they think it’s true. These factors are intertwined: the idea is, anyone informed enough to know that Obama isn’t a socialist won’t bother asking point blank, because we (where “we” includes the lying politicians) all know it’s not true. The people who don’t know that won’t ask, either, because they assume they are not being taken for a ride by the people who give them their news. When asked, point blank, by someone who’d normally fall in the “us” category, Boehner has no choice: he has to answer no.

This connection might be tenuous, but stay with me. Fatshionista’s Lesley (who, let’s face it, is a total rock star when it comes to being both pithy and right) wrote an awesomely spot-on post today about health care and personal responsibility, in which she, too, suggests we quit the bullshit and ask, point blank, what people really mean:

In fact, I have a better idea, one that would likewise save the industry quite a bit of money in healthcare costs.

Let’s just punish all sick people.

…

Should healthcare only be made available to the virtuous and conventionally-attractive among us? Or to people who aren’t poor and who can therefore afford such things as quality food and gym memberships? Would you argue that only people who are well-educated, or people who are Christian, or people who are able-bodied should get full insurance coverage? Should healthcare only be offered to people who have never failed to report a symptom that resulted in a late diagnosis of a treatable disease? Is healthcare only for people who get themselves screened for breast cancer or colon cancer or prostate cancer at the appropriate ages and as often as recommended?

Is healthcare only for the physically perfect and morally pure?

These questions are a natural extension of the suggestion to restrict the coverage and punish the millions of Americans who qualify as being under that questionable umbrella of “obesity”, for having no self control or discipline, because this argument’s proponents also tend to accept the fallacy that fatness is easily enough managed with a little motivation. And what the “charge fat people more!” comments really come down to, in plain English, is people expressing that they don’t want to pay for certain people’s healthcare because they just don’t like those people.

I know some people get angry when we talk here about debunking stereotypes about fat people, because it tends (especially for the fatphobic people who toss around those stereotypes easily) to spawn discussions about good fatties and bad fatties, or regular fatties and “really fat” fatties — and if we’re fighting for the civil rights of all fat people, then why do we need to say “Most fat people aren’t like X,” when we believe it would be okay if they were? The fact is, we’re very sympathetic to that line of thinking; we are achingly aware of the fact that every time we say “Most fat people don’t eat five pizzas a day,” there is probably someone out there thinking, “Well, how many pizzas do I get to eat before I count as a bad fatty, Miss Most Fatties Aren’t So Bad?”

But what today’s various posts about socialism and health care and fat have reminded me is that it is next to useless to debate with someone who doesn’t share your terms, who doesn’t mean the same thing by “socialism” or “obese” that you do. Why do Republican politicians work so hard to spread the idea that Obama is a socialist? Because to a lot of people, “socialist” is a slur, even though to a lot of other people, it’s a legitimate political philosophy that, in fact, still influences geopolitics. To some people, “fat” is a horrible insult, and they’ll do anything to convince you (and themselves) that they don’t really mean you, or you’re chubby but you’re not obese, or what have you. Here is a list of some things that some people would categorize as offensive slurs, but which I don’t mind being used to describe me from a friendly party:

feminist

radical

queer

dyke

fat

bitch

freak

Here’s a list of some words that I still can’t believe are used as insults, because the conditions they describe are not self-evidently negative to me:

socialist

retarded

fat

cripple

gay

black

poor

As in, I can’t imagine that everyone who uses those words as insults has actually thought through what they’re saying. Don’t get me wrong; there are people out there who trade in absolute hatred, and who get off on the power they have to demean others. I’m not talking about those people here. I’m talking, instead, about people who may not realize their own privilege or how soaked their language is with it. I’m talking about the people who say “That’s so retarded” and when I say “You know, my brother is retarded,” they apologize because they never thought about who they mean when they say that. I’m talking about people who say “Fat people are going to drop dead any second,” and when you say “Even this fat person? And this one?” they realize they were picturing the archetypal Headless Fatty*. The people who claim that the obesity epidemic (booga x 2) is ruining all our lives, and you say “This obesity epidemic?” they say “Shut up, those people aren’t even fat.” There are people out there who are open to the idea that Words Mean Things, and that they might not know everything already.

I don’t think being a socialist is a bad thing. But I also don’t think that President Obama is a socialist. Those are two things that both need debunking, and I don’t think their debunkings have to be mutually exclusive. Disingenuous people are taking advantage of widespread misconceptions and prejudices and using them to argue something they wouldn’t dare say out loud** if asked point blank: (socialism is un-American) + (Obama is a secret socialist) = “Obama is not a real American.” When they are asked, point blank, about their premises, by someone who knows what they’re trying to do, their logic unravels.

People who argue that fatties are all sick*** and deserving of the death they brought on themselves by eating so many baby donuts are relying on the undercurrents of fatphobia and ableism that aren’t always visible to people who have certain privileges. But when you ask, as Lesley does, “So do you think we should punish sick people?” — well, god help us, but I’d like to think that some of them would answer “No.”

In truth, that section of the bill would require Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling sessions helping seniors to plan for end-of-life medical care, including designating a health care proxy, choosing a hospice and making decisions about life-sustaining treatment. It would not require doctors to counsel that their patients refuse medical intervention.

Let me tell you a little something about end-of-life medical care. I’ve mentioned here before that my mother has Parkinson’s disease. What I have not mentioned here before is that she is dying. For the last several months, she has been receiving at-home hospice care. She spends most of her time sleeping in a hospital bed in the bedroom she shares with my stepfather. She can no longer sit up on her own or speak more than a word at a time. She can look at magazines but she can’t read or sign her name. She likes to listen to oldies on the radio station, and she likes to get visits from people, but she can’t really stay awake and attentive for more than half an hour or so. In the last five years or so, she has gone from having some bouts of confusion to being profoundly incapacitated. For many people, end-of-life neurological diseases operate more slowly, giving them time to adjust their lives to their progressive disabilities. For my family, by the time we had a diagnosis, things were already changing, almost too fast to keep up. This is complicated by the fact that my mother probably also has other neurological conditions which compound her dementia.

We did not get a lot of non-medical guidance throughout this process. My mom was in denial at first about how serious things were; she refused to see doctors, refused to face what was coming. By the time the rest of us realized how seriously her body and mind were changing, her dementia was pronounced enough that it became very difficult to communicate with her about long-term care decisions. You know what my family could have used, way back when we first realized that my mother had a progressive neurological disease, even before we had a specific diagnosis? A fucking death panel. Voluntary counseling sessions helping seniors to plan for end-of-life medical care. If someone had sat us down, as a family, including my mother while she could still communicate clearly and thus advocate for herself, and told us tactfully but directly that there would come a time when she would not be able to express her wishes, and that we should figure out now what she wanted then, our lives would have been, if not easier, less painful now. Because, the way it is, my stepfather and I are really just guessing. We don’t know if she would like a DNR directive, for instance. We don’t know if she would want to be buried or cremated. We don’t know what state she would want to be buried in, for god’s sake. We decided to enroll her in a neurological study (which involves an autopsy after her death) because she used to be a scientist and we think she would appreciate contributing to science even in her death. But that’s actually just an assumption we have made. We don’t know. We’re guessing.

Some of this, surely, is about family communication. Maybe we could have been more open with each other about death in general, or about our personal beliefs. But I don’t share a religion with my parents; my mom and stepfather don’t share a political ideology; we don’t necessarily have common ground to start with in our beliefs about death and care. My mom could have written a living will before she got so sick; she probably should have. Except, like the rest of us, she was scared out of her mind at what was happening to her, and she wasn’t thinking clearly about the future, because the future seemed impossibly distant compared to the terrifying immediacy of now. It took my stepfather and me almost a year to convince her to go to a neurologist in the first place; I can’t imagine that we could have, on our own, convinced her to imagine herself dying so that she could write down what we should do with her corpse.

That’s why we need counselors, professionals who know what it means to face end-of-life care and who know, pragmatically, what decisions have to be faced while you still have time to think. My family has been struggling on our own for years to coordinate my mother’s medical care while helping her have some semblance of a social life. Engaging hospice care was emotionally brutal, because it meant acknowledging that she was dying. I guess Sarah Palin and her cronies would call that giving up. But what it really meant was that we finally could get the resources we needed — medical, social, and personal — to give my mom some dignity. We are not just collections of organs that sometimes go bad. We are whole people, and counseling should be a part of medical care. When my mom was just profoundly ill, it was a family problem. Now that my mom is “officially” at the end of her life, it is a community effort: both publicly run (hospice care) and privately volunteered (help from her church community).

We are so terrified of death in this country — so sure that if we just do everything right, we will never face it, so sure that death is something that only happens to the very bad or the very old — that the idea of a counselor sitting you down to discuss your ideas about death petrifies people. We refuse to look at the reality of death, the fact that our minds are actually part of these bodies we live in, and that means they will one day cease. Death, in and of itself, is not a tragedy: it is part of our humanity. The tragedy here is that there are politicians trying to convince you that Obama wants to kill your grandma, when what he really wants is to protect my mom.

Here’s the thing about Robin Givhan, the WaPo‘s fashion journalist. She frequently writes about fashion in contexts that should make for fascinating readings: the images portrayed by women in power, and how their stylistic choices reflect (or, often, deflect) our expectations of femininity. Sounds right up our alley, no? But here’s the other thing about Givhan: she’s bad at it. To be more precise (and more fair), she’s not bad at writing, and she’s not bad at fashion; she’s just bad at feminism. Sure, I don’t need all reporters in the world to be feminist (but, oh, what a world that would be!), but if your beat consists of analyzing fashion and gender, and you’re not doing it through a feminist lens, you may as well work for Cosmo.

Givhan made herself infamous in the feminist blogosphere by dedicating an entire article to Hillary Clinton’s cleavage and how “unnerving” it supposedly was, during campaign season, natch. (Choice quote: The cleavage, however, is an exceptional kind of flourish. After all, it’s not a matter of what she’s wearing but rather what’s being revealed. It’s tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far. No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!) Now she’s weighing in on Sonia Sotomayor, claiming that for her hearings, Sotomayor chose to eschew femininity altogether. In maddening but typical fashion, she fails to even remotely discuss why Sotomayor might make such a choice, instead dissing her for being stuck in the ’80s — which is so hot right now, unless you’re a lady judge, of course. (See Jezebel for a great comparison of Sotomayor’s look to the “1980s lady power broker” that Givhan claims she’s channeling. Maybe Givhan isn’t that good at fashion after all.)

Whether or not you agree with Givhan’s premise that Sotomayor “embraced that period in fashion when femininity had no place in the executive suite” (for the record, I don’t), you’d think Givhan might at least mention the fact that Sotomayor’s status as a Vagina American has actually been a point of contention and debate in the past few weeks. Givhan sidles up to a gender-based analysis, but then she gets distracted by shiny things or something and doesn’t follow through:

In recent years, it’s been men in Sotomayor’s position, with their hands raised as they promise to tell the truth. In matters of aesthetics they’ve had it easy. They needed only to wear a tidy dark suit with an unstained tie and a crisp dress shirt. A fresh haircut was always a wise move. Meeting these meager requirements has sometimes been a struggle. Still, both Samuel Alito and John Roberts were mostly unremarkable when they appeared before the Judiciary Committee.

…

Sonia Sotomayor didn’t try to imitate the boys by assembling androgynous ensembles. That would not have gone over at all. Too dark a palette or too sleek a silhouette would have looked too urbane. Too unapproachable. Too minimal. Too suspiciously New York liberal.

Sotomayor avoided wearing clothes so bland that they faded into the background and left her looking dowdy and retiring and like she was trying to remake herself into something she is not. Based on her résumé and her life story, “flat” and “dull” are not adjectives that could accurately be applied to the “wise Latina.” So she was not a blur in beige.

Gosh, why do you think men wouldn’t bother doing more than getting a haircut and a dry cleaning before appearing before the Senate (and the nation)? It’s almost like they are evaluated on their accomplishments and qualifications instead of on their color palettes. I guess they’re just lucky!

I can’t believe that Givhan has the nerve to refer to the “wise Latina” comment — which has been widely mocked by white men (who, of course, are Neutral Humans) as a sign of being uppity — in the context of how neutral Sotomayor decided to dress, without even a hint of irony. It’s as though she has no idea that Sotomayor might have a vested interest in appearing nonthreatening to the white men who have been trying to get her to admit she’s some kind of pity nominee. Givhan writes that Sotomayor’s fashion projects the following statement: “I am palatable. I am familiar. And in addition to my ethnicity, I also know how to leave my gender at the door.” AND THEN THE ARTICLE ENDS. Because, I guess, there’s nothing interesting to say about being required to “leave” your ethnicity and gender at the door to the Supreme Court.

For a journalist who writes about fashion in politics, Givhan seems to miss the main point of her own work: fashion is political. Can you imagine the uproar if Sotomayor, a fat (or at least not thin)*, middle-aged Latina, actually showed up at the confirmation hearings in the sheath dresses and bare legs** that Givhan recommends? The powers that be in fashion may have announced that “Strength, femininity and fashion can coexist in the boardroom as well as on Capitol Hill,” but I’m pretty sure that these guysdidn’t get the fucking memo.

*ETA: I am actually not sure at all if Sotomayor is fat or “Hollywood fat,” but her body shape is still not one we would see in a lot of the fashion magazines that apparently should dictate her every move.

**IIRC, the Bush White House required women to wear pantyhose to work (though I can’t find a link for that at the moment).